If you have been in this industry for more than a few years, you have probably heard the sales pitch, “What keeps you up at night?” It’s a typical sales tactic to elicit an emotional response to threats that seem to be out of your control. It’s designed to draw you out, start a conversation, and ultimately, prey on your fears.

“It’s a tragedy.” At least that is what we are told. Time and time again, when bad things happen, we hear the same things replayed over and over again, or “what could we’ve done to prevent this,” or “we didn’t know.” In life, this can be an honest reaction to certain things.

First, if you are a SonicWall customer and you are using our Gateway Anti-Virus, Intrusion Prevention service, and Capture Advanced Threat Protection then your SonicWall firewall has been protecting your network from WannaCry ransomware and the worm that spreads it since 17 April, 2017.

According to ITC (http://www.idtheftcenter.org) data breaches in the US increased 40% in 2016, and through the first four months of 2017 are up an additional 42% over the same period last year. Just over half of all breaches are caused by cyber attacks, defined by ITC as hacking, credit card skimming and phishing.

Smartphones, laptops and internet connectivity have become necessities of life. We move around with powerful computing devices in our pockets or backpacks. This “on-the-go” lifestyle has transformed the way we work. Employees today want on demand access to resources and the ability to be productive from anywhere. Organizations too are embracing cloud and mobile, and allowing employees to use their personal devices for work.

In 2016, SonicWall detected a 600% growth in ransomware families. We saw a wide range of ransomware forms and attack vectors in the 2017 Annual Threat Report; some successful, others not so much. So, what is at the core of any successful attack? If you understand the seven components of a ransomware campaign strategy, you can better defend yourself from one of the most pernicious forms of malware in history.

For those following along, over the past two months there have been several reports, warnings, blogs and other industry analyses suggesting that HTTPS inspection by security companies is actually weakening security. Those that know me well know that I am a huge proponent of performing HTTPS inspection. I found myself arguing against the recommendations of various advisories that suggest the very thing I have been saying, or rather preaching, for the past several years was now bad.

Email has been around since the 1970s. Today, everyone and every business uses email for their communications. To put things in perspective, according to Radicati group – 122 business emails were sent and received per user per day in 2015! That is a lot of email for humans to process without making a bad judgement call.